


Distraction

by chainsaw_poet



Category: The Borgias
Genre: Sibling Love, Swords & Fencing, Unresolved Sexual Tension, incestuous thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-19
Updated: 2012-12-19
Packaged: 2017-11-21 14:08:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,655
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/598610
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chainsaw_poet/pseuds/chainsaw_poet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Following the revelations of Juan's part in Paolo's death, Lucrezia seeks comfort in her brother, and Cesare seeks to quell his own emotions.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Distraction

**Author's Note:**

  * For [gentlezombie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/gentlezombie/gifts).



> Set in the middle of 'The Beautiful Deception'.
> 
> A Yuletide gift for gentlezombie. Have a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year; I hope that - unlike Cesare and Lucrezia - you get everything you wish for.

The sword flew upwards from his hand, the steel of the grip grazing his skin. It left behind an awful absence where the weight of the weapon should have been, and a stinging in his palm. The blade moved through the air with what seemed an impossible slowness. It twisted and arched as it fell, so that the pommel hit the floor first. The sound of the steel against the flagstaffs cut through the silence like a scream. The blade quivered and sang, and the force of the impact seemed so great that, for an instant, Cesare thought that the weapon might shatter into a thousand pieces. 

When it did not – clattering to the floor instead – Cesare was reminded that some things are not as fragile as they appear.

Still breathing heavily from the exertion of their last bout, Cesare looked up and met Micheletto’s scornful gaze. Micheletto’s sword, which had been responsible for divesting Cesare of his own just seconds earlier, was now hanging from his loosely curled fingers, deceptively inert.

“What?” Cesare asked, walking over to collect his weapon. “I cannot pretend that it is rare for you to disarm me. Any pretensions I have of my own talents as a swordsman all but vanish in these sparring matched of ours.”

“That is true, your eminence. It is rare, however, that I rid you of your sword using precisely the same technique two days in a row.” Cesare cursed himself as he bent to pick up the blade.

“The same technique? Truly?”

“Exactly the same, your eminence.” Cesare sighed, and bowed in mock apology.

“I am a poor student, Micheletto. You must forgive me.” Micheletto half-raised his sword in an invitation to begin sparring once more, but Cesare shook his head. “I find I am rather distracted today.” Micheletto lowered himself on to a bench and began to run a rag over the blade of his weapon.

“Perhaps with good reason. I hear that your brother had an eventful night?”

The image of Juan, pinned beneath both a whore and a chandelier, returned to Cesare’s mind, and a smile played at the corners of his mouth. It was not the “little death” that had come to Juan that night, but its rather more gruesome older brother. Hearing Juan’s cries and seeing the macabre sight for himself, Cesare had attempted to pull the arrow-like tips of the chandelier from the woman’s back. It had taken almost all of his strength, and the girl’s blood had run freely over Juan’s bed, some even splattering the portraits that surrounded it. Juan had turned pale, and clutched at the bedsheets, trembling and entirely unmanned. 

“Somebody tried to kill me,” he had managed to stutter, as Cesare wrapped the body in the bedclothes.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Cesare had told him. “These old palaces. No one checks the fittings properly. The rope simply wore through. Give thanks to Our Lord that he spared you instead of your whore.”

But then the rope was in Juan's hand. It was blackened. It was still smouldering.

Leaving himself aside, there was only one person Cesare knew with the imagination for such a beautifully devious execution. And Juan had known it too. Cesare could see it in his haunted stare, in the horrid fearful smile that distorted his features.

Abandoning his reverie, Cesare joined Micheletto. “Has news of that incident reached the servants’ quarters already – or is it simply that you are omniscient?”

“I have heard at least three versions of the story. In one it was a whore who died in your brother’s bed, and in another, it was a youth from the palace kitchens. In the third, it was you who cut the rope.” Cesare knew a question when he heard one.

“If I were to make an attempt on my brother’s life, it would not fail,” he replied. Micheletto gave no response to this statement, most probably, Cesare suspected, because he knew it to be true.

“Do you know whose hand was at work?” Micheletto added casually, continuing to polish his blade.

“Perhaps it was Our Lord’s. He does, after all, move in mysterious ways.”

“Your eminence is not concerned that it will happen again?”

“I think not, Micheletto. My brother leaves tonight for Spain, and the holy institution of matrimony. In any case, what happens to Juan has long been little concern of mine.”

“If it is not your brother that distracts you, then perhaps it is your sister?” Micheletto ventured.

“I do hope not.” 

A silvery voice came from the entrance to the room, causing both men to turn their heads sharply. Lucrezia stood in the doorway. She looked, Cesare thought, as though she was made of stained glass. The sunlight seemed not so much to glisten off her skin, her hair and her gown, as to stream straight through her body, illuminating everything that lay before her in hues of gold and crimson. He held his breath for a moment, allowing her to seep into his flesh like some consecrated liquid; his wine and his blood. 

And, Cesare thought, therein the problem lay: their Spanish Borgia blood. They all had too much of it, and it was certainly too hot for anyone’s good. Every time he sat with his sister, Cesare swore that he could feel that blood coursing through not only his own veins but Lucrezia’s too, throbbing with a low hum as it seared through their bodies, simultaneously connecting and separating them.

Perhaps, then, it was for the best that the spell broke as Lucrezia stepped into the room, the shift in light showing a tiredness in her face that he had not seen since her marriage to Sforza ended, and that he had hoped had been banished for good. It was more than little Giovanni keeping her awake at night. She seemed to be carrying her grief on her back as she stepped into the room, the usual lightness gone from her step, but no less graceful because of it.

Micheletto glanced back at Cesare, colour rising into his habitually pallid cheeks. Replacing his sword in its sheath, he stood up.

“I must be leaving, your eminence,” he muttered.

“Please don’t leave on my account, Micheletto,” Lucrezia said, forcing a smile. “I did not wish to interrupt.”

“You did no such thing,” Cesare said swiftly. “Micheletto has business elsewhere, do you not?” Micheletto nodded sharply in reply, and gave a stiff bow to Lucrezia.

“Your ladyship will excuse me,” he said, no louder than before.

“I find him a little strange.” Lucrezia watched Micheletto leave and then took his seat on the bench, allowing her head to drift on to her brother’s shoulder. Fine strands of hair brushed Cesare’s cheek, weaving their way over his dark jacket like golden thread. 

“I’m sure he’s more than a little strange.” Cesare wrapped his arm around his sister, allowing the calloused tips of his fingers – no cleric’s soft hands for him – to tangle through the waves of her hair. 

“Do all manservants practise swordsmanship with their masters?” Her fingers pulled at the hem of Cesare’s shirt; a childhood gesture she had never quite grown too old for. On a different day, he might have teased her about it. All grown up, sis – a wife and a mother – and still you pull at my clothes as you did when you were small and wanted to be carried up the stairs in our mother’s house. Today, however, he wanted Lucrezia to hold on to any piece of childhood that his father’s machinations, Sforza’s cruelties, and now his brother’s evil deeds had not yet destroyed. 

“None that I know of, save Micheletto. He’s unusually talented. He almost always defeats me.” He smiled as he spoke to her, keeping his tone playful.

“I’m sure that’s not true. People say you’re a fine swordsman.” She paused, and moved her lips to his ear, whispering “Too fine, by half, for a cardinal.” He laughed, tugging gently at her hair.

“Flattery will get you everywhere, sis. You’ve inherited our father’s silver tongue. Combine that with your woman’s wiles and - well, I pity the man who crosses you.”

It was only after the words left his mouth that Cesare realised quite what he had said.

Lucrezia lifted her head from his shoulder and looked hard into his eyes. 

“Do you pity him, Cesare? I’m not sure I have any pity left.” 

“I pity the girl,” Cesare ventured, keeping his voice low. Lucrezia said nothing, nor did she lower her eyes. Cesare wondered what her many suitors would think if they saw the face of the beautiful, meek and girlish Lucrezia Borgia as it was now: hard, unforgiving, and shining. 

“When does Juan leave?” she said slowly.

“Tonight. I think he has taken his blessed deliverance from the chandelier as a sign not to linger in his bed any longer than is necessary.”

“Good. I pray to God that he never returns.” Her hand, he noticed, was still at the hem of his shirt. She sighed and dropped her eyes. “I should not say such things. He is still our brother.”

“In name alone,” Cesare said quickly. “For all he claims to wish only to protect the Borgia family, he shows precious little filial loyalty. Or love.” Despite his best intentions, a sad and sour bitterness must have crept into his voice, because Lucrezia softened suddenly, and brushed a curl of Cesare’s hair back from his cheek.

“I am sorry,” she said, her hand trailing down to his collar. “That you did not have a better brother.” Cesare twisted his features into a wry smile.

“Ah, but I have the best of sisters to make up for it.” Lucrezia smiled back, and encircled his waist with her arms.

“But sisters are – what was Micheletto’s word? Distracting. I distract you.” Cesare found that Lucrezia had, without his notice, pulled them closer together. He could feel her heart beating against his own chest, pressing the hot blood that they shared through her body. He prayed inwardly that she could not feel his, which seemed to be beating altogether too hard.

“You do not distract me,” he managed to say.

“Oh, but I must.” Cesare did not so much hear Lucrezia’s words as drink them up, perfectly formed, from her soft, pink lips. He felt himself being coerced into agreement. Yes, every time I see you I am driven to distraction. And, when night falls, of all the women I could dream of – all the women I have know and those whom I might wish to imagine – in the hot darkness of my chamber, it is your voice and your face that comes to me. 

But before he could say any such thing, Cesare realized that Lucrezia was still speaking.

“How could I do anything but distract you, and our father? First, my sham of a marriage. Then, my bastard child. And now a dead lover, with a funeral presided over by a Cardinal – the Pope’s son, no less!” Cesare began to stroke her hair, telling himself that he was doing nothing more than comforting her, ignoring any other stirrings that might be making themselves felt within him.

“None of this was your fault, sweet sis. Had our father not made you marry that pig of a Sforza, had he let you pick one you loved…”

“But I shall never be able pick the one I love.” Lucrezia was now so close to him that he could feel the warmth of her breath on his cheek as she spoke, soft low words that called forth within him the most sinful of longings. Longings that strained in every part of him; in deep and private places in his body and in his immortal, damned soul.

“And why is that?” he said, the words catching on his gasping breath. 

“Because I am the Pope’s daughter. And I must marry whomever I am told to.”

There was an instant of impact, not unlike the steel of the sword on the stone ground, as the truth of Lucrezia’s words catapulted into the beautiful fantasy that Cesare had woven around them, smashing his stained-glass world into smithereens. Lucrezia had not been speaking about him. She had loved that peasant boy. She had loved him enough to wreck revenge for him upon her own brother - enough to turn the heat of Borgia blood against its own: a remarkable triumph. She had loved Paolo, and now she loved no one. Likely, she would never love again. With Lucrezia’s body pressing against his own, her head nestling into his neck, Cesare thought that perhaps the substance that burned through his veins as he held his sister was no longer fire, but ice. And perhaps that was more dangerous still. 

“Poor sis,” he whispered. “Never to get what you most desire.”

“You speak as though you have experience in such things.” Cesare thought of everything that he had desired and then lost, and came upon only one subject of which he could safely speak.

“Did you ever hear me express any great wish to don a cardinal’s robes?”

Lucrezia shook her head, her hand moving from his waist to the grip of his sword. As the two of them sat in silence, she stroked her hand up and down the metal, sighing softly. Finally, she wrapped her hand around the grip, as though she might take up the weapon, if her hands were not so small, so soft, and so white. Cesare, however, knew better than to laugh at the gesture. It was foolish to think that women could not wield weapons; his encounters with them thus far in his life had taught him that much. Invisible though they may be, the weapons of women had all the bite of tempered steel, and could penetrate further into the heart than any blade carried by a man. Cesare feared the weapon of no man. But he had seen what women needed to do to survive in this world – and he though that Juan was right to flee from his bedchamber. 

When Lucrezia next spoke, it was as though she had been reading his thoughts. 

“Perhaps I would have done better if I had been born a boy,” She was looking down at her fingers, with an air of surprise as she studied how they clutched tightly and hopelessly at a sword that she could not even hope to lift. “It might have been better for all of us – and father too - if I had been born your brother, and not your sister.”

No. The burning lust would have been slaked by a man’s body, true enough. But with no one to protect, no one to whom he bore an absolute duty, no glorious and perfect being whose safety and happiness was the goal of his every deed? He was worse than he ought to be as it was. Without Lucrezia, the fate of his soul did not bear thinking about. His unspeakable desire might lead to damnation in its own right, of course. But in the absence of its object, his fate would be certain. 

“Mother always told us to be careful what we wished for,” Cesare told her. He allowed the silence to linger for some moments, before he cradled Lucrezia’s chin and raised it upwards so that their eyes met, forcing a smile as he did so. “Come. I am keeping you from that marvellous nephew of mine. And you are keeping me from the work I must do before we must bid farewell to the brother with whom God has chosen to bless me.” Lucrezia’s eyes crinkled in the corners, as she too broke into a smile.

“So you admit that I am a distraction after all?” she said, with a laugh that seemed to wash all the tiredness from her face.

“My favourite distraction,” Cesare said, planting the chastest of kisses on his sister’s forehead.


End file.
